Imagine you are on the sea. The ocean before you is liberally dotted with various inhabited islands. The sea is calm and the wind is fair. You want to sail from your home island to another, some distance away. The journey will take some time, enough so that this beautiful dawn will have passed into dusk by the time you arrive. There are no pirates or shark-infested waters along your way, just a need to plot a proper course. And for that, all you need is a tall ship and a star to sail her by…

[caption id="attachment_334826" align="aligncenter" width="750"] There is a light side and a dark side to everything. Not just the force.[/caption]

Thomas Wells wrote a very good review of this game several years ago. His take (from my reading) is that this is more of an art-project, an activity, than truly a game. Some might see it that way. After exploring this little gem, I (and several in my group) see it as more a game than an art-project. Certainly not just an activity. Read on and let me know what you think.

Tranquility is not always Silent…

My wife loves cooperative games. On a recent weekend, our normal game group could not all…

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What is gaming without games? What is life without memories? In Gaming Memories Volume 03, our team shares happy, sorrowful, or deeply impactful memories of their lives, seen through the lens of tabletop gaming. Please join us for Gaming Memories, and if you have one you’d like to share, drop us a line.

Board Building - K. David Ladage

I was about five years old when I realized I had a thing for board games. I was about nine years old when I discovered role-playing games, and that took over much of my gaming energy. Once I was in the Navy  many years later, Magic: the Gathering had taken over most of my board gaming time, and GURPS was the linchpin in my RPG space. Once I left the Navy, my circle of friends for playing anything dwindled.

My Navy buddy, Rich, returned to civilian life not long after I did and moved to Iowa. While he was working, looking to get back into school he opened his own game store. He would often come to my place to show us new games he was selling. We discovered a lot of games in those days, some of them quite eye-opening.

One of the first of those games to alter my view of what a board game could be…

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What is the problem?

I love games. That statement should be an obvious truth, given that I regularly write for Meeple Mountain. Some of the games that I love have, over time, lost their luster. It is not that my tastes have shifted, or that I have joined the cult of the new. It is that, to some degree, the game has been solved, in the sense that they have a single dominant or obviously correct strategy.

If you were around in the first couple of months after Machi Koro came out, there were several people on the innerwebs (especially on BoardGameGeek) discussing the order in which you should purchase the properties. A couple of games after reading those articles and it was rather obvious they were right. Machi Koro has had some expansions over the years and managed some attempts to fix the issue (such as no longer showing all cards in the market). This created a slew of other issues. To their credit, Machi Koro 2 did move forward some.

If you enjoy the game Gizmos and you spend any time on Board Game Arena playing the people who are rated with a 300+ ELO, you will quickly find that there exists one and only one strategy employed by high-rated players. If you aren’t constantly focusing…

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